Re: interference between package and exec-path values ?

[Jean-Christophe Helary <brandelune@gmail.com>]

> On Oct 20, 2018, at 15:35, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
>> From: Jean-Christophe Helary <brandelune@gmail.com>
>> Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2018 10:55:23 +0900
>> 
>>> Of course!  You are using 'append' incorrectly.  Evaluate
>>> 
>>> (append "/usr/local/bin/" exec-path)
>>> 
>>> and you will see what kind of result this produces.
>> 
>> Yes but :)
>> 
>> I had this expression in my .emacs.el file for a while now and it never interfered with package.
> 
> I'm sorry, I don't believe you ;-)  Either that expression was not
> evaluated at all, or some other factor(s) were at work that bypassed
> the error.

:) You're wrong not to believe me and you're right that some other factors at work bypassed the error. I seem to remember that I (badly) copied that expression from some article because when Emacs does not start from the command line it does not inherit the environment variables defined by the shell and thus you have to add the /usr/local/bin path manually from within emacs parameters.

And it happens that I used to launch GUI emacs from the command line until very recently when I started to call the Emacs.app binary directly and that's when the problem started to occur.

>> Also, when I start with -q and evaluated the expressions one by one, evaluating that erroneous expression did *not* trigger the error, it's only when I started emacs without -q that the error was triggered.
> 
> What do you mean by "does not trigger the error"?  The evaluation
> itself will never trigger any errors, as it is valid Lisp.  It's only
> when you start using the resulting value of exec-path that the
> problems pop up.  Perhaps previously, the resulting exec-path was
> never used in your sessions.

Would that be possible that when starting emacs from the command line the path defined by the shell overrides that expression (not sure I'm making sense here) ?

>  But it's a mistake nonetheless.

I understand that part :)


Jean-Christophe Helary
-----------------------------------------------
http://mac4translators.blogspot.com @brandelune